The Dry Creek Crossroad: Traditional Knowledge and Petroglyphs

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The Dry Creek Site is a multi-panel, multi-component rock art site containing both historic Ute and Ancestral Puebloan motifs as well as historical and modern Euro-American images, located in a natural drainage corridor in the San Luis Valley of the Upper Rio Grande River Basin. These corridors were frequently used to ascend and descend the steep mountains surrounding the San Luis Valley more easily during bison hunts. Although the petroglyphs present at this site are inherently sacred to multiple Tribal bodies, they have not been recorded before by archaeologists. The goals of this project are threefold: 1) preserving this sacred knowledge and sharing it with the descendant populations is the primary goal of this project; 2) determining the cultural and possibly temporal affiliations; and 3) characterizing the pattern and frequency of use of this site by different groups. In consultation with 25 Tribes and including participating Tribes’ cultural perspectives and the standards for recording rock art, the site was recorded, photographed, and illustrated using non-invasive and non-destructive traditional illustration methods. The images and motifs are consistent with long-term, repetitive seasonal use of the wash by Ancestral Puebloan and Ute peoples before the involvement of European-American settlers in the mid-1800s.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 52292